Well, hello there. Isn't this a surprise? It's been quite a while since I've had a blog. About 3 years, I think. The last one was AWSUM.org.uk, which had a mildly decent run but was eventually left by the wayside. I've had a large number of blogs in the past, so hopefully, this one won't go the same way, that is, neglected and not updated for months before eventually being shut down. I can't even count how many times that's happened now. The problem with those ones was that I generally stuck to blogging about personal stuff... and my life isn't particularly interesting, moreso these days, since I'm no longer at school. Which is why I'm going to try and write a little bit more about stuff that actually interests me on here. Like video games. Because I do love me some vidya gaems. Although I don't exactly have aspirations to be a games journalist or anything, I may even attempt some reviews and stuff on here. Oh my. Should be interesting.

So, since the topic of video games has already been dropped, SKYRIM.

I originally planned to have this blog up and running about a week or so ago. But, you know, SKYRIM.

Last week, I finally started playing SKYRIM.

SKYRIM SKYRIM SKYRIM.

Skyrim.

I struggle to remember the last time a game has sunk its claws so far into me and kept me hooked for this long. No, Call of Duty titles passed Modern Warfare 2 don’t count. Especially Modern Warfare 3. Since it’s release in November, I’ve sunk a little over three days into MW3′s multiplayer, as well as played through the campaign. But that’s it. I haven’t touched the game in over a month, and I’m unlikely to ever go back to it for any reasonable length of time. It took a couple of years to get here, but I think I’m done with Call of Duty. I enjoyed the everloving shit out of MW2, but the titles since then, I’ve put a progressively smaller amount of time into. Oh sure, I’ll no doubt end up picking up Black Ops 2 or Iron Wolf or whatever the hell that game ends up being called in November, but I can see myself being finished with it sooner than any of the other games thus far. I don’t enjoy CoD as much as I used to, so naturally, I don’t put as many hours into it as I used to.

But OH MAN SKYRIM. At the time I am writing this (which will be significantly before this blog’s “proper launch”, February 6th, to be exact), I started playing a week ago today, and I’ve already sank over 30 hours into this thing. And that’s with a couple of days of light/non-existent play. Last Sunday alone, I played it for 12 hours, and about 8 hours today. It’s not often that single-player games grab me quite like this, the most recent I can think of being Fallout 3, also made by Bethesda OH WOW WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT.

Oblivion never quite grabbed me in the same way Fallout 3 and now Skyrim have. I just didn’t really have time for it. I got Oblivion not long after I first acquired my 360 and, being a lad with a fair bit of disposable income and a shiny new toy, bought pretty much every game I was interested in. Sure, I’ve played Oblivion, but I managed to keep its claws at bay, simply because I had a metric shit-tonne of other games I also wanted to play at the time. And when I was done with those games, Oblivion was one I just happened to never get back to. I may go back to it later, for dat gamerscore, when I’m done with Skyrim, sometime next year.

While I mentioned that I may try my hand and doing game reviews and such on here, expect no such thing for Skyrim. Unless constantly gushing about how much I fucking love that game counts as a review. I know my limits, and even attempting to write a coherent review of a game so open and broad in scope as Skyrim would be nothing short of idiocy. And a waste of time.

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To amend this post to something a little closer to the actual "launch" of this blog (everything written from here on out was written on the 15th of Feb), I've recently being playing Gotham City Imposters. It's... well, I'm not entirely sure what I think of it yet. I don't dislike it, that's for sure. I've played enough to level up to low 20s (a couple of hours or so) on the XBLA version and as I'm writing this, the PC version is currently downloading off Steam. Whether or not it'll be ready before I head to bed in a couple of hours will remain to be seen, since my connection is spotty at best, and Steam's "Time Remaining" estimate is wildly fluctuating all over the place. At the very least, I should get some time in before work tomorrow. What will likely follow will be a post on here of some sort, where I attempt to try to arrange my thoughts about the game into something vaguely coherent. Whether or not that'll entail a full review, I don't know. I feel that strictly multiplayer-focused games can be kind of hard to review, especially since I have a history with and love of this particular type of game that it would be difficult for me to stay completely objective. I don't know. I might try a review, I might not. Regardless, expect me to talk a bit more about it in the near future on here.

I also played the Mass Effect 3 demo. It was good. I liked it. It has its flaws, but overall, it left a good impression on me, so I will definitely be picking up the full release at launch, most likely via pre-order. Don't wanna miss out in the inevitable in-game shit I would score from ordering early. As for the demo, it felt great. The shooting and combat in general feels much improved, similar to how ME2 was an improvement over the first Mass Effect game. It's no Gears of War, sure, but it's feeling more and more polished with each iteration. The cover system can be a little spotty, and the rolling about and whatnot can feel a little weird, but it's definitely not bad overall and as I said, feels better than the previous game thus far.

My only real gripe with it is that some of the dialogue and writing is a little... bad. Especially the end scene of the first section, with the overly dramatic, over-the-shoulder, "Good Luck". Urgh. I hope (and expect) the full game will live up to the standards of writing the previous two games set. But yeah, apart from those minor (and I say minor) gripes, the demo was still perfectly enjoyable, and I'm still very much coloured excited for the final release in a few weeks.

So there you have it, the virginity-taking post on this nubile young blog.